Maze War was the first networked, 3D multi-user first person shooter game. Maze War first brought us the concept of online players as eyeball "avatars" chasing each other around in a maze). From its 1974 origins on the Imlacs PDS-1 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, to its life in project MAC at MIT, on Xerox Altos and "D* Machines" running on early ethernet, to versions ported to Mac, NeXT and PalmOS, Maze War started it all. Today's massively multiuser 3D games owe a great debt to Maze War and those who created and kept on porting it to new systems for the past 30 years. Maze War or "Maze" as it is affectionately known, is the reason why nobody can claim ownership of the rights to the invention of a multi-user 3D cyberspace.

Shown here (and
housed in our collections) is the only known original printed screen
shot of Maze War in action on the Xerox Star 8010, provided by Dan
Croghan, playing the game in 1985 or 1986 at Xerox. He is seeing
the game from the perspective of his desktop and his opponent is the
eyeball on the screen and is named "SH". Dan is in turn the
player named "bloodshot" (you can see his and his opponent's
point score at the bottom). The overhead view of the maze is seen below,
the 3D view above, with the player's "avatar" shown.

Dan tells us that this was a "heart pounding game" when compared
to the otherwise dull environment of the Xerox document/desktop metaphor.
He noted that you could "shoot" your opponent if they did
not see you (their eyeball character was facing away from you). He also
notes that you could "hide" in parts of the maze and wait
in ambush. Presumably you could only see your location in the overhead
map, not that of the other players (that would be a cheat that would
make the game very boring!). You can see an almost identical image of Maze War running on a Xerox
Alto here.

Origins
and ports of Maze War

Played over
the ethernet by researchers and regular employees alike, the earlier
origins of this game at NASA Ames Research Center are reported in the
section below by Howard Palmer below. David
Maynard reports that at Xerox PARC, its earliest date of use
was probably 1975 or 1976 on the Alto. Through research we have determined
it was coded for the Xerox machines by Jim Guyton, Bruce Malasky, and
assorted others at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). We presume
it was then ported to MESA for the Star, 6085/Viewpoint and later GlobalView
for Sun and the PC. We don't know who did the ports for Mac, NeXT or
PalmOS.

Maze War represents
an early example of the division between the staid and rather uninspiring
environment of document-GUI computer interfaces for "serious work"
and the dynamic, social, energetic environments of virtual worlds for
play.

We then asked:
is Maze War actually the first such environment? Know any more about "Maze"? Let us know!

Howard
Palmer reports the True Early History of Maze War!

Ask and ye
shall receive! Howard Palmer found our initial Maze War page and gave
us some gems of history:

Cool! But I
don't think it was created at Xerox originally. Here's my take on the
history:

In the early
1970s, there was a group of guys at NASA Ames working under a program
that Ames had with local high schools. There was a machine called an
Imlac PDS-1, which was sort of like a PDP-8, but with 16 bits and a
vector graphics co-processor (see http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/imlac/
). Ames had several of these and it fell upon this group to make them
do something useful. Given our ages at the time, that naturally included
some games. Initially the games were 2D, similar to pong, many of which
were written to exactly duplicate an arcade game in a local Togo's,
for the purpose of practicing without the quarters, in order to get
good enough to win a free sandwich. (No one ever won the sandwich, though,
as far as I remember.)

Howard Palmer
writes further:

Rather, it
was a game (whose original name I can't recall) which Don O'Brien tried
to exactly reproduce on the Imlac in a program he called "Drop". I think
there were three rows of rectangles at the bottom of the screen, moving
horizontally in different directions and different speeds. You would
drop a bomb and try to hit a rectangle as it moved, with the bottom
rectangles being worth the most points. No one ever won the sandwich
because the game in Togo's was removed before we got good enough by
practicing with Drop on the Imlacs.

The senior members
of this group were Steve Colley (see Steve's history of Maze here) and myself. We had written a
lot of useful software for the Imlac, but never any games, and we were
feeling like it was time that we proved that we, too, could write fun
code. As we were sitting around brainstorming one day, we came up with
idea of a networked, multiplayer maze game. I suggested to Steve that
it would be really cool if it could be 3D, but Steve didn't think that
the Imlac had the necessary processing power. But then I pointed out
that a maze with all 90 degree angles might enable a simpler 3D rendering
than the general case. Steve got excited about this, and as he often
did, came back the next day with an implementation of the graphics for
the maze navigation. Within a short time, networking code was added
to get the multiplayer version going (we had been experimenting with
ad hoc LANS for the Imlacs as part of our more serious work).

One of the
members of this group, Greg Thompson, took the Ames Maze War
to MIT (see Greg's description here) when he started there. Greg, Mark Horowitz (now professor
Horowitz at Stanford), and George Woltman (of Mersenne Prime
fame) built a hardware implementation of Maze War for a class project
there. Beyond this, my knowledge is fuzzy, but I believe Maze War propagated
from MIT to Xerox. Some where along the line, a version was implemented
that worked over the ARPAnet, and it took off from there.

Greg Thompson
can be reached at gregt@ncube.com (Steve founded nCube, sold it to Larry
Ellison). He can probably give you more details about what happened
with Maze War at MIT, if you're interested. He may have listings of
the Imlac code.

I was at Xerox
P.A.R.C. when Maze Wars was first released on the Alto. I beleive this
was in 1976 or 1977. It was an immediate hit with all the engineers.
For a little while, work almost stopped. Management was powerless to
do anything about it. You could hear the distinctive clicking of the
keysets* as you walked down the hallways. One very nice feature of Maze
Wars was the ability to peek around a corner without becoming visible
to those in the hallway you were peeking down. This greatly added to
the tension and strategy. Your description is correct in that you could
only see your own location on the overhead map. It was all programmers
playing, and the source code was checked into the central source code
repositories, therefore it was inevitable that several unscrupulous
programmers created cheat versions allowing them to become "Maze
Lords" and see everyone's position. This so upset the original
authors that they eventually decided to store the sources in the repository
in an encrypted format. The Maze War sources were the only ones encrypted,
even though these repositories contained many of the early crown jewels
of computer science.

* The keyset
was an input device with five piano key shaped keys that one corded
with the left hand while the mose was in the right hand, re-invented
by Doug Englebart at SRI when he invented the mouse. He tried to patent
both devices in the late sixties. He got the patent on the mouse, along
with Bill English, but discovered that the keyset was patented in the
1860's by Western Union.

I noticed the 1971 date for "Maze War" ... yet, the article doesn't seem to bear out that date. At best, towards the end, we get a mid-1970s date.
The reason I'm curious about this is that I finally tracked down the programmer of SOLAR, a 3D multi-user space warfare game that ran on a Burroughs B6700... around 1972/1973. He's not familiar with other computing gaming history, and is making no claims, but I was curious :)

Ted writes: Here is a cartoon I drew when MazeWar was new at PARC. I think the cartoon was from 1980.
Harold Hall was the new head of the Systems Science Lab, SSL. He often came looking for people that he did not know. LRG is the Learning Research Group, and I and Bob Flegal were in it. I think he actually did pop in and say he was looking for Bob Flegal when one of us was playing MazeWar. I immediately drew this cartoon and posted it on the wall.

Maze
War Lives Again!

For the grand
opening of the DigiBarn on July 13, 2002, Don Woodward, a former
Xerox guy and current collector/maintainer of Xerox hardware, got Maze
War running on our Xerox 6085 network. Al Kossow let us know
he actually has MESA source code for the Xerox Maze War. Don had the
executables and set up GlobalView for X (Sun Solaris), GlobalView for
Windows, and we then offered Maze War play to attendees on the 6085
and Windows machines. It was a thrill.

Someone reported
to us that they believe that Maze War was ported to the NeXT workstation
so it could well be that it continues to live on.

Maze
War 30th Birthday at Vintage Computer Festival 7.0

We just celebrated the 30th anniversary (1974-2004) of Maze! See our review of the Maze War Retrospective event which was held at the VCF 7.0 on November 7th, 2004. There is a great deal more information on Maze on those pages. This event resembled our Alto 30th birthday party at the VCF in 2003.